


Dreaded

by orphan_account



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Dark!Solas, F/M, Freeform, I'm going to be honest: this is rated just because--, Playing around with rhythm, but a very canon take on Dark!Solas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-09
Updated: 2015-03-09
Packaged: 2018-03-17 01:19:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3509840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(No no no! He cannot want her as his equal! And yet he does. What he wants, what he wants so badly because he can see in her eyes a softness when she looks at him, a desire for a thing he has not had since Mythal breathed and walked in her own flesh – He wants…. He wants… He wants…)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dreaded

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KeeperLavellan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KeeperLavellan/gifts).



> KeeperLavellan inspired this with her Lord of Tricksters story, I will not lie. 
> 
> My Solas is sadder and less neurotic than hers, I think, but I don't really find this any less disturbing, for various reasons.

He will not deny his own hubris.

That is why the name is fitting, is it not?

_(Solas, Pride, the whispers of a shattered, broken man who had once been whole and boundless, who is boundless no longer.)_

Perhaps it is arrogance that makes him believe he can simply use her, as he has used others. Trust is a tenuous thing, a tool, and because he allows himself to trust few he can extend to them pieces of his fragmented self in hopes that they latch onto whatever shadow-truth he gives them. There is no harm in allowing people to trust him when the lies are not direct.

_(It is still dishonesty, of course, something he once claimed to abhor at the same time he had used it as sword and shield alike. What a miserable hypocrite he is.)_

So when she comes to him, honest, expresses her concern to him, her annoyance, in her direct way, he does not turn her away. Instead, he seeks to show her small fragments of the greater Truth, just enough that she latches onto him, just enough so that she trusts him, just enough so that he can convince her to do as he wills.

It is, after all, his Mark that she bears.

His Mark. His power. His will.

_(The thoughts are full of feelings that he quickly suppresses—objectivity and analysis have always been his friends, his only friends. He learned too quickly what emotional entanglements lead to. He cannot afford that mistake again.)_

And at first things go so well. She is isolated. She is depending only upon him. It was a calculated move, to monopolize her attention, pique her curiosity, guide her thoughts. He was not beyond using any means to do so, not beyond dropping his voice to lower registers, taking advantage of her clear attraction to him, highlighting the symmetry of his own face that he could tell she enjoyed.

He was not expecting him to see himself in her.

_(Too much. Too fast. If he comes to see her as his kin, if for a moment she becomes something other than a person he keeps at arm’s length – though he has no intention of seeing her come to permanent harm by his hands—then he will surely be doomed. Doomed because she will be a person.)_

The risk had been calculated.

He was excellent at manipulating people. They were his system, his rapport, and yet if he had one flaw it was that he cared too deeply.

He had always cared too deeply – how did others see him? How could he let them suffer? Was he right? Was he wrong?

Her distress over his death was palpable.

It moved him, though he pretended it did not.

And yet there was always one thing he overlooked in his own plans:

He had a **_heart._**

_(And it beats, and it bleeds, and it is the reason why he has always been this way. So early, his “family” abandoning him, when Mythal found him, picking up the pieces – Fear became Rebellion became Fear again in an instant.)_

How was he supposed to express this?

There was no reasonable way to. One moment she had been a pawn on a chess board and the next moment she had become a person, someone he respected. And through her they all started to become real.

Blackwall’s struggles became something he could relate to.

Sera was a being full of color and he allowed himself to be reminded of who she bore within her breast.

Varric’s stories were more meaningful than whispers he used to comfort himself.  
Cassandra’s faith **_meant_ ** something.

_(They reminded him of what he had once had. They reminded him of a time when he could still trust people, when his heart was not a bitter shriveled thing that so easily cleaved to the first bit of compassion shown to him. So fucking pathetic. So fucking desperate.)_

So when Compassion came to him, aching and bruised but still so soft, when Compassion whispered of the way her words embarrassed him, he realized what he should have already realized long ago.

Why was it that her blue lips vexed him?

Why was it that when her fever spiked he had feared, desperately feared, that he would never see her green eyes again?

It wasn’t what he had told himself, was it?

It wasn’t the Anchor, no matter how much he attempted to reassure himself that he could still see her as a tool.

_(He cares for her now, as he cared for Mythal, for Shartan, for all the bruised and broken Elvhen children born in this age and the last. To pick them up, to make them strong. Still he was so paranoid that he did this because he wanted others to be wrong. It was Pride. It was Hubris. He was such a fool…)_

She had him.

She had him.

She had him.

He had let her in, he trusted her, and his plan, just like that, started to crumble.

In his ears, Wisdom whispered to let her in.

Pride held him back.

She had to remain a tool, his means to seal the Breach.

But she couldn’t.

She wouldn’t.

_(He should have stopped it. He should have ended it. Foolish, foolish Fen’Harel.)_

All he could do now was hold it back, this burning desire for companionship, the thing within him that he would always stamp out before someone else could betray him and leave him bloody—before he could betray himself.

The fact was, he could blame everyone else for his problems a thousand times over.

He could blame Elgar’nan, Anaris, the damn Shems and their empire, so easily manipulated by the honeyed words of invisible forces that they had no means of understanding. He had been the victim, he could say, the one who had been used, manipulated, but that would have been foolish.

He had known.

And he had let himself be tricked _(The irony! Oh, the exquisite irony!)_ simply to satisfy his own selfish taste for what it meant to be someone other than “an outsider”.

_(And now he exploits the same tendency in her, and he cannot even trust his own intentions any longer. Perhaps he seeks to claim her for his own selfish reasons. Perhaps he seeks to claim her in every way someone can be claimed, and in return breathe into her a part of the truth, in return teach her that his adulation should be the only adulation on her tongue—erase from her face and body those damning marks.)_

And yet he fought for freedom, even now.

For The People.

For himself.

To bind her would be a betrayal of his every belief. If he wanted to bind her, to make her his sole worshiper, he would not so badly want to erase those angry red lines from her skin. They were an affront not only to him, but to history, to everything those people his heart still bled for had lost.

And yet on the other Dalish they had not seemed to matter.

Not like this.

_(No no no! He cannot want her as his equal! And yet he does. What he wants, what he wants so badly because he can see in her eyes a softness when she looks at him, a desire for a thing he has not had since Mythal breathed and walked in her own flesh – He wants…. He wants… He wants…)_

Fen’Harel, the Trickster, has allowed his heart to be twisted into tender knots.

The Dread Wolf has let himself, unintentionally, fall to the behest of another.

He Who Hunts Alone, not entirely by his own choice, but also completely by his own doing, wants a chance at happiness.

_(But he is a vessel of the hopes of the people, the monster they must necessarily have. The Long Shadow cast by The People. Their silent guardian, the anti-hero Trickster whose mercies were harsh truths about reality, lessons best learned for survival. He cannot want to be a **person.** He is many things but never a **person**.) _

A person has friends and family, things he cannot have.

A person lets himself be helped.

A person admits that he is afraid.

A person could choose their path.

_(These are not things he has ever been able to do – He was born alone, he would live alone, he would die alone, and there was nothing he could do to alter that, even though loneliness made his soul shrivel, even though dying without anyone to care for him made his entire life feel empty, invalidated.)_

But despite his intentions, she drew him in.

Despite his intentions, she made him remember his vhenan, the still beating heart that was his care, his desire to help, the soul that he had thought so shriveled that it was beyond repair.

She healed him.

And that made it possible for him to break his promises.

And he could **_never_** break his promises, because that was the only thing that could make everything he had wrought right again.

A true god need not prove himself.

_(But he wanted her. He wanted her. He wanted her.)_


End file.
